Hidden Treasures

But what should be done with unnecessary or damaged documents, books and scrolls, as well as with texts declared by the rabbis as pernicious or contradictory to the dogmas of Judaism? Such materials were often buried in cemeteries and some Jewish communities have maintained this custom to this day. However, the principal way to keep unwanted, defective or "heretical" manuscripts as well as out-of-date documents was to place them in special chambers or niches in the synagogue's attics. Such a chamber was called a genizah (literally: "hiding-place,") derived from the Hebrew root g n z hence the word lignoz to conceal).

Every ancient or mediaeval synagogue had its own genizah. As the genizah filled up, it was sealed forever, or so it would seem. But in the 19th century, some synagogues in Middle Eastern cities were repaired or even destroyed which provided an opportunity for opening the genizahs, thus allowing the materials to pass into the hands of collectors and scholars. It appeared that many unique texts of various contents had been kept ancient and mediaeval Hebrew theological and scientific treatises, literary works, and a mass of other interesting documents. The largest genizah so far discovered, is that of the Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, commonly named the Cairo Genizah, which was discovered just over 100 years ago, in 1896. The importance of this discovery can be likened to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, since the significance of genizah material for mediaeval Jewish history may be compared with that of the Scrolls for the history of early Christianity.

The immense amount of Cairo Genizah materials and the extreme variety of its contents is easily explained: for many centuries, Cairo played an important role as one of the most prominent Middle Eastern economic, political and cultural centres; the Cairo Jewish community consequently held a leading position among other Jewish communities, not only in Egypt, itself one of the oldest lands of the Jewish Diaspora, but in the Middle East in general.

Soon after the Arab conquest of Egypt, in the late seventh century, the newly-built city of Fostat became the administrative centre of Egypt and remained so until the adjacent city of Cairo was built in the 10th century. In 882, Jews of Fostat bought a destroyed building, formerly the Coptic church of St. Michael, repaired it and reopened it as a synagogue, which they called the Ezra Synagogue.

For many centuries, the genizah of the Ezra Synagogue slowly filled up with material. About 1,000 years later, information concerning the genizah began to reach Europe. Early evidence attesting to its existence, such as that of the 18th century poet Simon von Heldern, did not attract the attention of scholars at that time.

Thus, practically speaking, two collectors Jacob Saphir (1832-1886) and Abraham Firkovich (1787-1874) may be considered the discoverers of the genizah. Both of them visited it as early as 1864, but were not able to estimate its importance. Saphir, a bookseller, was interested in manuscripts in good condition, which could be profitably sold. But, the genizah comprised mostly fragments, and in the prevailing conditions, even high-quality paper or parchment leaves were undergoing a constant process of decay as a result of the humidity, mud, dust, rodents and insects. Even ancient manuscripts would not attract buyers due to their unpleasant appearance and the expense involved in restoration. Consequently, Saphir was in the Ezra Synagogue for a very short time and took away with him only a few leaves.

Abraham Firkovich was a Russian Karaite, already well-known by that time among scholars as a traveller and collector, who had sold a large collection of Hebrew manuscripts to the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg. He was interested in every kind of material relating to Jewish history, especially concerning the history of the Karaites, whether it was a complete text or a fragment; well preserved or damaged. He had examined fragments at another Cairo genizah that of the Cairo Karaite synagogue, in May-June and in September, 1864. After he had finished his work there, he came to the Ezra Synagogue intending to study its genizah. The leaders of the Cairo Jewish community had no objections to the studies of a Karaite historian. He wrote about his plans to study the genizah to his son-in-law, Gabriel Firkovich, but, it seems, interrupted his work suddenly, most probably because of illness. He was already 77 years old, and he had felt ill after three weeks of investigations at the Karaite Genizah. However, he removed some materials from the Ezra Synagogue and took them with him to Russia. After his death, these fragments, together with manuscripts from the Karaite Genizah and others, were purchased by the Russian Imperial Public Library and became known as the Second Firkovich collection (the First Fikovich Collection had been sold to the same library by Firkovich himself in 1862).

Additional materials from the genizah were received by European libraries and private collectors in the early 1890s. The repair of the Ezra Synagogue undertaken in 1890 by leaders of the Cairo Jewish community caused the occasional opening of the genizah, and in a short time a number of collectors appeared who took away some parts of its treasures.

Among these collectors were Prof. David Kaufmann, rector of the High Rabbinical School in Budapest; Eikan Nathan Adler, a historian and traveller from London, and the Archimandrite Antonin (Andrei Kapustin), head of the Russian Orthodox Church Legation in Jerusalem. At present, Kaufmann's collection is kept in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Adler's collection is in the State Public Library, St. Petersburg. Some documents were also received by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

But the main part of the Cairo Genizah materials are to be found in the Cambridge University Library, which has over 140,000 of the total 250,000 fragments. The library received such valuable material by a stroke of luck.

In 1896, two English ladies Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, while travelling in Egypt, acquired some fragments from the Cairo Genizah. On returning to England in Spring, 1896, the ladies showed the fragments to Prof. Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University for identification.

Solomon Schechter, who played a key role in the acquisition of the genizah materials as well as in genizah studies, was born into a hassidic family in 1847 (or according to other sources, 1849), in the town of Fokshany, Romania. His education was in the traditional Jewish manner: he studied in talmudic academies in Romania and Poland, but being gifted and eager to learn, he continued his education at modern Jewish high schools: the Beit Hamidrash in Vienna and High Rabbinical School in Berlin, and he attended lectures at the universities of Vienna and Berlin. At that time, among the lecturers were prominent Hebraists such as Abraham Jettinek who had published a collection of midrashim narrative, allegoric commentaries on the Bible, and Prof. Moritz (Moshe) Steinschneider, a pioneer of Jewish bibliography. After persistent study, Schechter added knowledge of the principal European languages to his rabbinical ordination and mastered philological methodology. He published some mediaeval Hebrew texts and earned recognition as an expert in Semitic studies. As a result, in 1882 he was invited to London as a private teacher of Hebrew, and from 1890 to 1902, lectured at Cambridge University as a professor of talmudic and rabbinical literature. In 1902, he was appointed rector of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he resided until his death in 1915. Besides Jewish history, he devoted much attention to theoretical problems of Judaism and was a pioneer of the conservative Jewish movement in the United States.

May 13, 1896, the day when the two ladies showed Schechter their genizah fragments, became a noteworthy day in the history of Jewish studies. Among the fragments shown to Schechter was an ancient leaf that caused a real sensation. Schechter identified it as a fragment of the "The Book of Wisdom" ascribed to Ben Sira, a second century bce Jewish sage. The Book of Wisdom became a part of the Christian biblical canon when translated into Greek. But the Hebrew original text was considered lost, and many scholars even doubted its existence. Schechter's discovery immediately attracted the attention of his colleagues, and then other fragments were tracked down in the Bodleian Library, the British Museum and others. All the fragments found had a common source the Cairo Genizah.

With the hope of locating additional parts of the original Ben-Sirah text, Schechter decided to journey to Cairo. He found a sponsor for his trip Dr. Charles Taylor, Master of St. John's College at Cambridge University, a mathematician, and a scholar deeply interested in Jewish history.

In December 1896, Schechter left for Cairo. He carried with him letters of recommendation from the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Dr. Herman Adler to the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, Aharon Ben Shimon and from the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University to the president of the Cairo Jewish community, Joseph Kattawi, which was intended to procure access to the genizah. The genizah itself was located in a narrow chamber without doors and windows, at the end of the synagogue gallery. The only way in to it led through a large hole in the wall and it was necessary to use a ladder in order to gain access. The chamber was full of fragments that emitted clouds of dust at every touch and naturally, was totally in the dark. It was in such conditions that Schechter had to work. However, due to his great erudition and enthusiasm, he was able to classify the contents of the fragments while still in Cairo. The leaders of the Jewish community agreed to hand the genizah materials over to the Cambridge University library and in Spring 1896, Schechter brought back to Cambridge with him 104 boxes crammed with ancient manuscripts.

A year later, on June 14, 1898, the Syndics of the CUL reached the decision to acquire the genizah materials brought by Schechter and to name it the Taylor-Schechter Collection. In November 1989, the university council ratified this decision.

Up to the time he left for America in 1902, Schechter continued to study the genizah fragments. The main problem was to identify them. Even complete mediaeval manuscripts rarely contained a title-page; and much of the material was in the form of individual leafs or even fragments of a leaf.

It was no great problem to identify biblical and talmudic fragments as well as parts of prayer books, but the genizah demonstrated great diversity of contents, thus its study called for wide erudition. For instance, it was not enough to have knowledge of Hebrew to identify the fragment of Ben-Sirah's "Book of Wisdom," since no Hebrew text of this work had been known before Schechter's discovery. Schechter compared the unknown Hebrew text with old Christian translations of the work in Greek, Latin and Syriac. In 1899, Schechter and Taylor published the entire text of the "Book of Wisdom" piecing together all the fragments. Schechter also published a collection of unique texts originating from mediaeval Jewish sects as well as some liturgical works.

Schechter spent every moment when he was free from lecturing, except for Sabbaths and the Jewish festivals, in the library examining the fragments and inhaling noxious dust. Although he used a type of respirator available at the time, it helped little, and he undermined his health by the work.

From the first appearance of the genizah materials in Europe, scholars began to pay serious attention to them, mainly because of the diversity of the documents.

First of all, the large numbers of mediaeval official and private documents (mostly from Middle Eastern Jewish communities) should be noted. Suffice it to say that before the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, no library had possessed such documents. The discovery provided scholars with thousands of various documents: community minutes, rabinnical court records, title-deeds, leases and endowment documents, debt acknowledgments, marriage contracts (ketubot), private letters, etc. Most of the documents date to the tenth13th centuries a period poorly represented in Jewish narrative sources. The genizah documents threw new light on the history of the Egyptian Jewish communities in the period of the Fatimid caliphs (tenth12 centuries) and the Ayyubid sultans (12th13th centuries). An important body of documents was found relating to the history of the Jews in Palestine at that time and their relations to the Crusaders. The genizah materials dramatically demonstrated the great role played by the Jews in the economic and cultural life of the mediaeval Middle East, and provided significant evidence of the prevailing good relations between Jews and Arabs.

It should be noted that facts and data revealed in the genizah concern entire communities as well as private persons. Hundreds of persons previously unknown are mentioned in genizah documents, and often their leading role in the communities is clear. But the documents also provide new information about well-known men, such as the theologian and philologist Sa'adia ben Yosef al-Fayumi (892-942), the great poet Yehuda Halevy (c.1080-1145), and the greatest mediaeval Jewish philosopher and physician, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, (Maimonides or the "Rambam," 1135-1204). For instance, before the discovery of the genizah, only a few lines written in Maimonides' hand had been known. Found in the genizah were over 30 Maimonides' autographs, including not only his signature, but also drafts of his works, such as his commentary on some Mishna tractates and a number of letters.

It seems that the conversion of gentiles to Judaism was virtually impossible in mediaeval Europe. Nevertheless, some cases of such conversions are recorded in European sources, although most former Christians were executed by the Inquisition. In the genizah an interesting testimony to a conversion with a happy end is found. A catholic priest, Johannes, from the town of Oppido in southern Italy, a descendant of Normans who had come to that part of Italy in the 11th century, converted to Judaism in 1102 in Aleppo, where he had arrived during a crusade. He took the Hebrew name Obadiah, in honour of his native town, learned Hebrew, became a cantor and travelled to Baghdad, Damascus and Eretz-Israel. The story of his conversion as described by himself was published by a Hungarian scholar, Alexander Scheiber, pieced together from genizah fragments found in different libraries. As a cantor, Obadiah copied a prayer book in Hebrew and provided the text with European musical notation of that time; unfortunately, only the last leaf of this manuscript was found in the genizah. But in any event, this is a unique source of both Jewish history and for the history of music, as it is the oldest known Jewish text with European musical notation.

The importance of the genizah documents is not limited to the history of the Jews of the Middle East. There is a voluminous and interesting correspondence between Jews of this region and their co-religionists in Europe, India and North Africa. Also, many documents have become a unique source for the general history of the Middle East, providing important information on Arabic Moslem and Christian sources.

To cite one example: in 1135 the Moslem ruler of Kish, an island in the Persian Gulf, attempted to conquer the important sea port of Aden in Southern Arabia. Two letters from Jewish merchants contain many details concerning this attempt, including descriptions of the ships involved (even enumerating the number of sailors on each vessel), and giving the date, which was unclear in Arab chronicles.

The genizah documents give a detailed picture of the economic and cultural life of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean region over many centuries. This aspect of genizah studies was one of the principal trends carried out over several decades by the prominent scholar Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900-1985). He studied at German universities, came to Palestine in the 1920s, and later became one of the founders of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His scholarly interests were extremely wide: he published mediaeval Arabic biographical works and modern folklore records, wrote monographs on the history of Jewish education and on Yemenite Jewry. But his principal work, based on the genizah documents, was an immense monograph in five volumes, "The Mediterranean Society," describing social, economic, political and cultural aspects of Mediterranean Jewish communities in the tenth-13th centuries.

Another basic work by Goitein a book on trade between Europe and Mediterranean countries and India in the Middle Ages, based on over a thousand genizah documents, is being prepared for publication by one of Goitein's students, Prof. Mordechai A. Friedman of Tel Aviv University.

In 1962, an American mediaevalist, Prof. Norman Golb, was studying an ancient letter preserved under glass at the Cambridge University Library. He was especially interested in some strange names among the signatures which were neither in Hebrew nor Arabic. The text itself was damaged by mud and humidity, and was difficult to read. However, an ultra-violet photograph of the letter enabled Prof. Golb to read the name of the place where the letter was written: Kiev, thus providing the oldest (tenth century) evidence of the existence of a Jewish community in the Ukranian city.

The non-document part of the genizah includes a wide variety of ancient and mediaeval Jewish literature: biblical and talmudic fragments, theological treatises, liturgical texts, philosophic and scientific works, poetry and prose, folklore and the occult.

The genizah particularly expanded our knowledge of mediaeval Jewish literature (Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, and even Yiddish). Hundreds of works by dozens of authors previously unknown were found in the genizah.

Among these writers were gifted poets such as Said ben Babshad (tenth early 11th century). Fragments of Ben Babshad's "Book of Wisdom" were found in the two Cairo genizahs, at the Karaite cemetery Al-Basatin by Abraham Firkovich and in the Ezra Synagogue by Solomon Schechter. The latter published his fragment in 1890, and different scholars subsequently found and published supplementary fragments. This work, which is of great interest from both the literary and philosophical points of view, is the only known work by Ben Babshad, and the author's name is not found in other sources. A Russian scholar, Leib Vilsker, discovered some 200 hitherto unknown poems of Yehuda Halevi in the State Public Library of St. Petersburg.

One of the most popular mediaeval Hebrew literary works was Tahkemoni a collection of maqamot (entertaining stories in rhymed prose) compiled by the well-known 13th century poet, Yehuda Al-Harizi. Tahkemoni had been published many times, but in all the editions some unclear words and passages remained. Gita Gluskind, an assistant professor of Hebrew at Leningrad University studied the Firkovich collection for many years and found their original variants, allowing reconstruction of the author's text.

Living for over 1,000 years among Arabs, Middle Eastern Jews spoke and wrote Arabic. In addition to their own literary work, they also transcribed Arabic literary works, scientific treatises and even Moslem theological books into Hebrew characters.

Sometimes, unknown Arabic works were also found in the genizah. For instance, the present writer has identified fragments of a love story between an Unmayyad caliph, Al-Walid II (743-744), and a woman called Salma, previously known just by the title. One of the fragments has an exact date 1240.

The rich store of linguistic material contained in genizah manuscripts includes unusual types of punctuation in Hebrew; unknown works on Hebrew grammar and lexicology; and sources for history of Arabic dialects. The genizah also preserved fragments and documents written in Arabic. A large proportion of this material is made up of medical texts. The most probable source of such medical fragments is the private libraries of mediaeval Jewish physicians. Among these materials some unique manuscripts were found, such as the pharmacological work of an 11th century doctor, Ahmad Ibn Al-Djazzar.

In addition to separate manuscripts and documents belonging to mediaeval Jewish private libraries, the genizah also preserved book-lists giving an idea of such libraries in their entirety. Over 30 such lists have been found; although, unfortunately, the owners' names are not known in many cases.

In conclusion, it should be emphasized that the genizah materials reflect aspects of Jewish life in many countries of the mediaeval world (especially in the Middle East) and that they are an irreplaceable source for knowledge of contemporary Jewish history and culture. During the 100 years following the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, scholars from many countries have published a great deal of the materials found there and have thus contributed to various fields of science. But the genizah materials are well-nigh inexhaustible, and there will be material for many generations of scholars to study in the future. For decades, one of the difficulties in this study was the result of the fact that parts of the same manuscripts were to be found in several different libraries, some of which were inaccessible. But now most of the genizah materials have been put on microfilms which are kept in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Moreover, modern photographic technology enables a more accurate deciphering of texts.

It must be remembered that the Cairo Genizah is not the only one. Valuable material is also preserved in the Karaite Genizah, mostly included in the Firkovich collection and in some other genizahs. Moreover, new discoveries are also possible. The study of Middle Eastern genizahs by scholars of different countries will contribute to the further understanding of mediaeval Jewish culture.